A new kind of wilderness

Today’s editorial: Governor Paterson’s plan to hold off on land purchases that the state is already committed to is bad for the environment, bad for state’s credibility, and bad for groups that put up the money.

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A moratorium, some are calling it. It’s an innocuous enough word, making Governor Paterson’s determination to suspend the state’s practice of buying land in the Adirondacks and Catskills to conserve it sound more responsible than it is.

It’s not hard to understand why the governor wants to cut the $59 million land acquisition portion of the state’s Environmental Protection Fund. The state, after all, has a $7.3 billion budget deficit. Even a cut of, yes, the entire $59 million for land acquisition must have a certain appeal when the state confronts such a fiscal crisis.

But Mr. Paterson’s commitment to austerity doesn’t stop there, and that’s where the real trouble begins.

Prior land acquisitions, of a magnitude that have further enhanced the environmental treasure of the Adirondacks, are at risk as well. The abrupt elimination of money for land conversation purchases could create some very innocent victims of New York’s hard times.

It’s not just state government that’s involved in these often very complicated deals. Yes, it’s the state’s money — the taxpayers’ — with which these large parcels ultimately are purchased and added to New York’s Forest Preserve.

But it’s conservation groups — The Arlington, Va.-based Nature Conservancy, for example, and its Adirondack chapter, along with the New York City-based Open Space Conservancy and the Lake George Land Conservancy — that initiate these deals.

They act, in effect, as the middlemen. They buy land with their own money and — until now, at least — the understanding that they’ll resell it to the state. Draining the land acquisition fund will leave these organizations in the lurch.

The Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy, for instance, still owes about $80 million on its $110 million purchase of some 161,000 acres from the Finch, Pruyn paper company in 2007.

That was an extraordinary purchase — of some 80 mountains, 70 lakes and ponds, and a quarter of the whitewater gorge portion of the Hudson River shoreline — reflective of the determination of both conservation groups and state government to preserve the Adirondacks forever. It’s unsettling to think such preservation can be retroactively threatened. Some 600,000 acres in the Adirondacks alone have been protected this way since the Environmental Protection Fund was established in 1992 — funded by a real estate transfer tax that continues to be a reliable source of revenue for New York, even in a severe recession.

No matter what the state calls it, this is a default. As surely as not paying back bond holders would hurt the state’s credit rating, reneging on these deals will strike a blow to New York’s credibility. And its ability to make such deals in the future.

What other purchases are now in limbo? Which ones might never be made at all?

This is about more than a moratorium. Instead, a fiscal crisis is on the cusp of giving way to an environmental crisis.